As you’d expect, almost all organisations use outside vendors at some stage in their handling of operational data, to out-task particular processes such as data aggregation or alerts; or to provide analytics and automation tools, increasingly with AI/ML capabilities baked into the service.
Preemptive organisations make more extensive use of vendors across the board (see Figure 7), and all organisations say they plan to increase the range of activities they use vendors for. Our data suggests that organisations will increasingly look to vendors as a source of data sets to supplement internal telemetry. The reason? AI and machine learning are as good as the data that feeds the algorithms, and vendors can offer access to data collected globally. For instance, internal network monitoring will measure your network’s performance; but only a vendor with performance data on thousands of networks can place your own success in context. These vast data sets also enable powerful AI engines to build accurate, predictive models.